Game keepers keep predators in check and manage the moors to preserve habitats of many species which are in sharp decline nationally, research suggests.

Grouse-shooting on the Yorkshire moors on the Glorious Twelfth the following day would be cautious, with landowners anxious to preserve stocks.

Goathland was popular with wealthy visitors from the West Riding who came for grouse shooting, walks on the moors and the golf course, which was then laid out on the village green, with drives across many of the roads.

moory

Though now enclosed, a few acres lie still uncleared, growing nothing but ling and gorse, the natural product of a moory soil when left to itself, and various kinds of course sour grasses, their botanical names being unknown to the writer.

In Isleham and Snailwell special measures were taken to limit the effects of fen grazing: in the latter village, 1,200 sheep were ‘kept healthy by preventing them from feeding on the wet, moory, fen common; this would be drained, and improved to a very great advantage, were not the water penned back upon it, by a staunch, forming a fish pond, at Fordham Abbey’.